The Self Service Portal allows delivery of Monitoring faster and smarter

Self-Service for Enterprise Monitoring

The Self-Service Portal (SSP) from Orb Data provides a new way to deliver Enterprise Monitoring services to your business. Including plugins for popular montitoring tools such as IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM) it is eay to establish a Self-Service approach to monitoring your Enterprise that allows you to:

Devolved Responsibilities

When deploying Enterprise System Management (ESM) solutions the bulk of the work ends up concentrated with a small ESM team who quickly become a bottleneck, reducing the value provided by the new tools. The problem is that tasks are often impossible to delegate as management tools expect every user to be a trusted expert and so sharing them more widely means placing powerful but unaudited tools in the hands of every operator.

SSP lets you delegate and collaborate between the Systems Management (ESM) team, their customers, operations and subject-matter experts. Application and system owners can select and configure monitoring directly, without specialist knowledge and without involving the ESM team. Operations groups can dynamically reconfigure server monitoring on demand. Common configurations can be deployed and removed automatically.

Devolving responsibilities in this way improves the richness, relevance and accuracy of monitoring configuration, increases end-user awareness and involvement, and releases the ESM team to focus on service quality.

Smart Organisation

Expert Knowledge

Best practices are established and shared, based on expert knowledge. Suggested values are provided and common configurations made re-usable. Collaboration is encouraged while maintaining consistency. Standards are pre-defined for particular capabilities, containing common configurations, to act as a starting point for users to take control from there.

Why Use Standards?

In SSP, Standards define a set of approved values for a particular type of configuration. For example, this could be a common set of processes to monitor, or a recommended set of alert thresholds for OS components. Users browse and select from the Standards available to them. When multiple Standards are selected SSP is smart enough to know how to merge them together.

Standard offer a number of significant benefits:

Give users a quick start in building Profiles

Encourage best practices

Act as a baseline for change and exception reporting

Maintain consistency between different users with different objectives

Encourage the reuse of common settings

Allow collaboration and role distribution

Exploit Expert knowledge

Why Self Service?

Monitoring Challenges

Key Features

Enable rich and granular configuration

Exploit expert knowledge

Approve and maintain standards

Reduce implementation delays

Contain and control access to changes

Track configuration history

Manage configuration versions

Automate configurationelds

Implementing a successful Enterprise Monitoring solution presents a number of challenges. This begins with establishing the infrastructure and deploying agents. These tasks are quite rightly best left in the hands of the Systems Management team themselves.

However, this is just the start. What about deciding what should actually be monitored? This issue of service quality and granularity is perhaps the biggest challenge of all. This complex problem is often reduced to one of three approaches:

Monitor key components only

Deploy one-size fits all standards

Monitor everything with out of the box settings

All these approaches may quickly lead to a lack of trust in the solution because they can result in irrelevant alarms, missed alarms or false alarms.

Redistribution of Roles

Orb Data’s self-service approach solves this problem through the redistribution of roles between the Systems Management (ESM) team, their customers, operations and subject matter experts. Devolving responsibilities in this way improves the richness, relevance and accuracy of monitoring configuration, increases end-user awareness and involvement, and releases the ESM team to focus on service quality.

Presentation

If a self-service solution is implemented well many other significant benefits can be realised. ESM frontends are traditionally too heavyweight and esoteric for exposure to typical end-users. Orb Data SSP adds a presentation layer between the end-users and the ESM technology.

Some immediate benefits can be achieved with this presentation layer:

Simplification

User-friendliness

Access control

Separation

Separating the presentation layer also provides the opportunity to add some deeper and more fundamental benefits:

About Us

Orb Data brings together People, Process and Technology to deliver the cornerstone of business success: the management of IT infrastructure. At our heart are our people. We have unrivalled experience, helping us to achieve an enviable reputation for excellence in project delivery. Because we’re independent, we identify actual issues and help organisations resolve them –from spec to deployment, and beyond –providing the right solution in terms of best of breed technology and support. We offer a refreshingly simple approach to the way we conduct business. We take pride in our abilities to provide first class solutions to business problems, and to conduct working relationships with honesty and integrity.